Saturday, 30 January 2010

As-Salāmu `Alaykum, no oink for meand I never let a d-boy boink for free

Young Money - Roger That

There really aren't enough rap songs which use the word boink, are there? Ever since Rob Breezy alerted me to the charms of Nicki Minaj's verse on Young Money's Roger That (you can mute it for a minute or so inbetween Nicki and Wayne's verses when Drake's pansy ass is rapping) last week i've been looking up at least 1 Nicki Minaj song on Youtube ever since. Female rappers are generally shit but Nicki has joints, and her cover of Warning is particularly interesting :

Not even because saucy interpolations of Biggie classics are always good or because Nicki managed to ape every nuance of Biggie's flow so perfectly. What really impressed me here is that she managed to hold her phone and gesticulate animatedly into it exactly like Biggie and Puffy too :

Thursday, 28 January 2010

J-Zone is perhaps the finest renaissance man in rap of the past decade and change : patron saint for those of us who base our life decisions on Eazy E lyrics, creator of the best indie-rap albums not made by DOOM, Count Bass D or R.A, producer of bangers for the likes of Akinyele and R.A, mixtape compiler extrodinaire, ig'nant gang$ta-rap tastemaker, HHC and Fat Lace column writer (I'm sure Robbie over at Unkut would admit he's borrowed liberally from those columns over the years) and a pretty fine blogger to boot judging by his posts on Dante's site.

So back in 2006 I greeted his collaboration with Celph Titled as the Bo$$ Hog Barbarians with trepidation. Oh sure, Celph killed the 'Zone tracks he guested on on $ick Of Bein' Rich like Steady Hoggin' and Eatadicup, but at that point Celph Titled was just some humourous punchline rapper dude whose 12"s I'd always see gathering dust in Bongos, who was primarily known for getting into fights with turd burglers like Cage. Was he really worthy of holdin' down a full album with 'Zone? Turns out he was, but the biggest suprise of their combination was that Celph had beats himself. And not just any old let-the-other-guy-pad-out-the-album-to-appease-his-producer-aspirations beats, but that ol' robotic, futuristic, George Jetson sounding Bay type shit that E-40 was rockin' from, like, '98 - '02. Dayum, these shits are lethal :

Bo$$ Hog Barbarians - You Got Mail

Bo$$ Hog Barbarians - Dog Show Pageant

Not one to be outdone by his compadre channeling other producers on his own shit, 'Zone managed to summon up the spirit of Just Blaze for Celph to go all Akinyele on Celph Destruction which outdid any of the discordant bollocks or lazy beatjacks one Justin Blaze esquire dropped that year, bar Dynomite by Rhymefest or I'm Talkin' To You by T.I, which basically is standard Just Blaze circa '06 discordant bollocks but good standard Just Blaze circa '06 discordant bollocks that you makes you wanna reenact scenes from Hard Boiled and Hard Target.

Bo$$ Hog Barbarians - Celph Destruction

'Zone needs to make some new music, and someone needs to mention to Celph's that there's a guy called Turf Talk who'd sound pretty, pretty good over his beats if he still has any in the same vein as You Got Mail and Dog Show Pageant lying around his crib.

Tuesday, 26 January 2010

And so we wave what might be a final tah-rah to Chantal Hadley as Jesus College Oxford were knocked out of University Challenge last night and relegated into that confusingly pointless cauldron with other teams which've been knocked out who could still potentially make the next round if the moon orbits around the sun a particular way the night of transmission or something.

Chantal had obviously took us calling her the Hoxton Hindley to heart, and jettisoned the whole Hoxton half of the equation to settle squarely on the Hindley portion for her current look, which we wholeheartedly approve of. Yeah, okay - Hindley was an evil cunt who killed innocent kids, but so was the hot assassin bird from 24 who blew up the airplane with children on it in the first episode, and we're not gonna stop cracking one off over her anytime soon, are we? Besides, looking like Myrah Hindley is infinately less offensive than looking like a Morissey loving Urban Outfitters employee on the scale of heinous activity.

Chantal, we know you read this blog (#3 Google hit on "Chantal Hadley" + "University Challege", baby) so we have two pleas for you : puhleez sign up for the third series of Are You An Egghead this summer, and do be a dear and join our pub quiz team one time because our token bird member really is shit on the questions about maths and the Bronte sisters which she professes to be an expert on.

Sunday, 17 January 2010

I have neither the technology nor the knowhow to convert my tape of this, and I can't find a downloadable link which doesn't require an unlisted password. Anybody help? I feel i'm being denied a basic human right by not being able to listen to Red Dots and Sunsprayed when grocery shopping or browsing in Blockbuster.

Speakin' of Sunsprayed, Murs and 2 of his Living Legends mates calling themselves the 3 Melacholy Gypsies as they do liggedy lyrical third eye spherical ribbedy-rapping over a guitar riff from Heart Shaped Box by Nirvana in a video where they indulge in all kinds of 4 eLeMeNtZisms shouldn't work, it really shouldn't, and yet, every time I listen to it I suddenly feel the urge to strap on a Jansport, grow my Razor Ramon stubble beard into a full goatee which I can then dreadlock up, buy a beaded necklace, and try to rhyme every sunday morning monosyllabic grunt out of my mouth with the phrase "loading my pistol with lyrical projectiles" in rapid motion. Go figure.

Thursday, 14 January 2010

2010 is the year when The Martorialist crew are gonna start hittin' up metal clubs again. It's been 4 years since we last stepped south of heaven and the memories of masses of 14 year olds, fat birds trying to look like Dita Von Teese, and having to endure shit like Funeral For A Friend have faded to the point that we've gotten it into our heads that metal clubsb in 2010 are now populated by wall-to-wall rock chick vixens and play nothing but classic shit by Motorhead, Danzig, Bon Scott era AC/DC, Faith No More, EyeHateGod, Ozzy era Sabbath, Slayer, Trouble, Anthrax, Kyuss, various songs from the Rocky 4 soundtrack, and the n.W.o Hollywood Hogan entrance version of Voodoo Child (Slight Return).

The trouble with metal clubs is that metallers are a tight-knit community deeply untrusting of outsiders who don't wear the mark of the beast setting foot into the belly. In 1999/2000 our Silas/Carhartt/Adidas or Nike get ups were generally accepted due to nu-metal whiggatry being rife at the time, but a mere 3 years later metal had closed up shop again and our mate Gary who sported a black and red Adidas tracksuit to a metal night hopin' to pull some Korn fangirl tail was ostracized for "looking scallie" and ended up gettin' ejected by the bouncers amid accusations of selling weed in the bogs.

What to do, what to do. We were stumped until a lightbulb went off that urged us to look to our blog compadres for sartorial inspiration for the appropriate attire for the long way back from hell. On one hand, we can appease our whigga souls and get NWA-ed up in black Raiders hats, 501s and Jordans like Reza which should be acceptable on the left hand path due to an excessive amount of black. On the other, we could follow Dom's lead and use his peacocking-at-metal-gigs-in-non-threatening-garb technique with mustard coloured jackets and scarves.

We're not sure which course of action we're going to take yet, so as we're pondering whether or not we should buy some platform boots and JNCO-sized bondage kecks to appeal to the goth foxes instead, here's a guide to storing metal shirts on the excellent Old School Metal Shirts site. Man, metallers really are the Japanese of white ppl subcultures :

ROLLE THE ZIP BAG, LAY IT INTO A HOLE PUNCHERAND HOLE THE ZIP PAG. THEN YOUR SHIRTS CAN BREATH

YOU CAN USE A IKEA RACK (MODEL EXPEDIT)OR A PLASTIC BASKET TO STORE THEM

Bonus beats :

Eff a guilty pleasure. If you've never danced on a table in a shit metal club to this, your life has been sorely misspent.

Tuesday, 12 January 2010

I wanted to post Yellow Panties as it's the only Jeckyll & Hyde song I love which I've not posted on here. I could've done a post with it alongside P.I.M.P by Keak Da Sneak to demonstrate the Bay's weird obsession with mid 80s NY rap, but I didn't really fancy doin' a music post today.

Instead, I thought It'd go just swell with a post about the finest pissing scene (yellow panties, piss - geddit?) to ever grace a movie. Of course, the finest pissing scene in the history of movies is the golden shower scene in Team America, but we're into that more niche stock here at The Martorialist, so it's today's edition of this series is going to have to come from Troll 2 instead :

Troll 2 often gets tarred with the so-bad-it's-good brush and has developed a cult following to the point where there was a documentary about it showing at various film festivals last year, but, I 'unno, it's a pretty cool unique lil' scary movie about goblins who trick people into eating food that turns them into vegetables so that the goblins can then eat them, that's profoundly more engaging and entertaining than a fucking borefest like Avatar.

Like Joshua's dad tells him : you can't piss on hospitality. What you can do in its place is check out Rob Breezy and Superix's All Black Everything mix over on Southern Hospitality of conscious-rap choons with the word black in their titles by Lakim Shabazz, Brand Nubian, Poor Righteous Teachers, 2 Kings In A Cypher and so on. Trust me when I tell youthat you'll never hear a mix with a finer intro, and that's word to Dead Mike.

You should also check the Fat Lace podcast, where Dan Large and Drew Huge induldge in a post-Man U' vs. Leeds session of Ultramagnetic jokes, slept on conscious-rap, golden-era and bay gangsta-rap gems, some standard classics and Dan finally gaining braggin' rights over Drew.

Sunday, 10 January 2010

1. Why hasn't someone uploaded the full Ice-T and Coco bits of All Star Mr And Mrs up to Youtube yet? Streetz ain't givin' a fuck about Carol Smillie and some kid from Coronation Street.

2. Why didn't Ice and Coco win the money for their chosen charity when Coco got the question right about which year Ice's masterpiece O.G Original Gangster came out in? It wasn't her fault that Ice was a year out and thought it came out in 1992, thus denying them their charidee loot.

It was a decent watch anyway, if only for Ice refusing to answer when Schofield asked him his real name, and Rhyme Pays, Power and O.G all getting mentioned on a UK tv show which goes out to millions of regular squares and mongs. One of the reasons I liked Notorious was because I got to hear the likes of Warning, Juicy, Kick In The Door and see an actor playing Craig Mack in the company of what Bobby "The Brain" Heenan would call ham 'n' eggers or humanoids, and this worked on much the same level.

So, shall we take a quick gander at all the videos from O.G since they're all currently on Youtube? I say we should jump at the chance since it's a rare occurrence any Ice video lasts more than a couple of months before Warner Brothers get it deleted, muted or have the embedding disabled feature implemented. Yeah, let's stick it to the man!

Ice-T - O.G Original Gangster

Ice's thorough explanation of what happened inbetween Reckless and 6 In The Morning, where he somehow forgets to mention the bit about sorta ripping off Schoolly D's whole steez.

Ice-T - The Tower

Ice-T - Mind Over Matter

Ice-T - the only man on the planet, bar Mike Muir, who could make a baseball cap and ponytail combo look fly.

Ice-T - Midnight

One night sometime in 1998 we were waiting for a taxi after a particularly drunken night out and there was a tinted 4x4 opposite blasting this. I went over and knocked on the window to compliment whoever was inside on their taste in music, which possibly wasn't the best idea in hindsight, but nobody answered so I just got my boogie on with a complicated dance routine which alternated between bow-legged nut grabbing and furious air-guitar action until our taxi came. It occassionally still keeps me awake at night not knowing who was inside that vehicle.

Ice-T - New Jack Hustler

Interesting movie fact : apparently Larenz Tate used listen to this over and over to get into that O-Dog state of mind for Menace II Society.

Thursday, 7 January 2010

This isn't a post to discuss the return of Vicki Coren's BBC4 quiz show Only Connect the other night (if Jenny Ryan isn't a contestant this series then I want my licence fee back) or comment on how Rob Breezy was right a year or so back after I made that post about Kate O'Mara when he said Stephanie Beacham was also another foxy GRAMF.

Hell, this isn't even a post to inform you that Lady Sovereign appeares to have regressed into me when I was 14 years old. This post here is just a little heads up to let you know that this coming saturday night - and you may need to sit down before reading the next part - Ice-T and his bird Coco are on ITV's All Star Mr & Mrs presented by Philip Schofield and Fern Britton.

Yup, you read that right, and isn't it great that race relations in America have now gotten to the point where the fake-tanned white chick is darker than her black boyfriend? Fuck Obama - Ice and Coco are the true face of progression, son.

Bar Doctor Who and TV Burp, saturday night tv is usually about as appealing to me as having WD40 sprayed directed into my jap's eye (a go-carting enthusiast kid I went to school with had this done to him on his birthday and was in so much pain he had to go to hospital to get his bellend cleaned), or having your eyeball impaled with a piece of jagged wood a la Zombie Flesh Eaters, but this might the one instance when it'll be worth missing a trip to Nando's and the cinema to vegitate in front of primetime ITV programming. If only it could've been Darlene instead, though. If only....

Ayo, Ice - give Schofield a dead arm, will you? Here at The Martorialist we've always hated that mugging twat ever since he ruined the end credits to every episode of Ulysses 31 and Round The Twist when they were on CBBC by singing over the top of them. Payback is due, Pip.

Monday, 4 January 2010

Holy shit, this tune knocks. Apparently this one has been out for a while, but it went almost completely unnoticed until the Southern Hospitality boys recently plucked it out of mixtape obscurity and rode for it. I've been worrying that Turf Talk is gonna follow E-40's lead for his next full length and include a bunch of contrived cross-region tracks with, like, Jae Millz, or use boring sub-2001 Dre type beats instead of Rick Rock and Droop-E bangers, or even end up with his album being half full of autotune jams with Trey Songz for da ladeez, but if it has at least 6 tunes which sound like this on it then it's gonna be a top 3 album of the year and the benchmark all Bay gangsta-rap songs with quick Mac Dre impersonations should aspire to.

Count Bass D & DJ Pocket - Palease

Good bugged-out rap is thin on the ground these days besides DOOM and Lil B when he isn't doing stuff which sounds like a pre-pubescent Killah Priest rhyming over the instrumental of Orinico Flow by Enya, so it's good to see that Count Bass D has reappeared. Did he really have to drop 2 mixtapes in the space of a week, though? Jesus, I've got at least 6 books I'm tryna read at the moment and we've got rappers releasing 2 mixtapes a week? Anyway, I dunno who DJ Pocket is but he seems like the perfect partner for the Count if the In The Loop tape is anything to go by. Is Palease the first rap song to mention Heather Mills, or did Joe Budden have a conceptual 300 bar freestyle about her which he uploaded to Youtube mere seconds after Macca and Mucca left divorce court?

Lil' Phat ft. Foxx & Webbie - Cuttin' Up

I have a thing for weed carriers so I've been feelin' Lil' Phat popping up on every 3rd Boosie tune for the past year or two. Finding out he's managed to get on all those Boosie songs because he's the son of the owner of Trill Entertainment only makes me love him even more. Levi's, which was Phat's joint first before Boosie put it on SuperBad, was great, but it's pretty hard to go wrong making a rap song about America's most iconic manufacturer of denim, so the real test is can he knock out the odd good track of his own which aren't themed around such obviously pleasing subject matter too now Boosie is doin' porridge? The answer appears to be yes, as long as Webbie is also present.

Mickey Factz - Amnesia

Factz is a weird one, isn't he? When he gets it right - tunes like Incredible, Automatic, Robot Rock and Pumpkin - he sorta has this modern day Grand Puba type steez going on, but when he gets it wrong...oh man. 6 of the 8 tracks on his new Dark Phoenix ALPHA EP make the songs he did over This Ain't A Scene.. by Fall Out Boy and Stop Me by Mark Ronson & Nathaniel Merriweather sound like something off Efil4zaggin, but this is exactly the sort of thing I want from him. Nice to see NY rappers finally making peace with the concept of BASS! in their shit again too, as the great tragedy of NY rap from the early 90s onwards is that most of it just isn't particularly car friendly.

Curtains - Genesis

He'll probably never make another tune as good as That's What It Is, but I don't really give a shit as this'll do just fine as a substitute. Check out Curtains gettin' his meta-blog-rap referencing on too, especially when he ends that section with the "I'm the pill - I got the internet goin' ham" line. Can we get Jay Electronica mentioning my Frank Vs. Immortal Technique post in a song next?

Yelawolf ft. Juelz Santana - Mixin' Up The Medicine remix

White-on-white crime caused me to initially dismiss this guy as some sort of Miami Ink-ized white trash gimmick hybrid of Bubba and Paul, but after digesting his recent Burn One tape I'll concede that he's alright. Of course he'll never be able to top the achievement of offending Bob Dylan fans with the Juelz original (the Hell Rell phone freestyles on Diplomatic Immunity Volume 1 > Highway 61 Revisited and Blood On The Tracks), but he was pretty much born to rap over this tune to the point where I wish Juelz would've gone and made some crap single with Ron Browz instead.

Sunday, 3 January 2010

Like Jeezy I don't be Tweetin'. It's not that I'm NOT a narcissist trying to turn a corner of the internet into a shrine to myself too, but the only thing I can think of that's possibly worse than polluting the internetz with every asinine thought of mine or mundane updates about the hemp seed oil I've just bought this afternoon, is having the invaluable information about Shaun Pollock bowling averages and Spanish license plates stored in my head that may well come in useful in a pub quiz one day forever dislodged from my dome by YOUR asinine thoughts and mundane updates about the hemp seed oil YOU'VE just bought this afternoon, and NONE of us want to see that happen, do we?

So, you'll have to excuse me while I use this place for an anally self-indulgent year end list post. This one is more for personal future reference, so here's a picture of a cock 'n' balls shaped tomato grown by a friend of mine to keep you amused while I get on with the boring stuff.

No specific order to any of these.

TV shows of 2009 :

Life
Are You An Egghead? series 2
Peep Show series 6
Curb Your Enthusiasm season 7

Movies of 2009 :

The Wrestler
Mesrine 1 + 2
Moon
Bad Lieutenant, Port Of Call : N.O

2009 movies everyone else hated which I sorta liked :

Gamer
The Box
Notorious
Surrogates

Man, fuck all y'all. Especially all y'all who kept recommending Where The Wild Things Are who caused us to waste last night watching it at the flicks.

Radio shows of 2009 :

Hawksbee & Jacobs on TalkSport
Jeff Mao on SpineMag radio
Greenpeace on SpineMag radio

Quik & Kurupt wiped the floor with everyone else in rap; The Dream wiped the floor with everyone in general; Curren$y's official debut is the best rap album which doesn't actually exist as a rap album; and Converge's latest effort is pretty much Converge-by-numbers down to the sad epic closing track and that's exactly what I want from a Converge album.

AKA rap songs I was feelin' in 2009 that I've not mentioned on here in previous posts. All of these got serious play by me and most will feature on any 2009 playlist I'll make in the future.

Live shows of 2009 :

De La Soul doing 3 Feet High And Rising
Ghostface

Biggest lolz of 2009 :

Rafa Benitez in general
Mark Hughes getting the sack

What was funnier - Rafa's shellshocked expression and nervous laugh when Geoff Shreeves asked him about Xavi Alonso after Liverpool lost their first math of the season, or Wenger barely being able to conceal a smug grin when asked about his opinion on Mark Hughes gettin' the boot? Pity nobody asked David Moyes for his thoughts on Sparky's departure as he'd have probably given us the most rousing rendition of The Laughing Policeman in recent memory.

Friday, 1 January 2010

Feeling as though Leprechaun In The Hood is going on in my head after last night, I'm using the rap blogosphere as my hair of the dog this afternoon. Thankfully, help is at hand with Freaky Friday Uncut over on Fat Lace with Michelle Thorn, Renee Richards, Jo Guest, Michelle B, Lolly Badcock etc all gettin' their thrupenny bits out :

And Burn One AKA Mick Vegas over at BLVD ST alerting us to Big Boi's Shine Blockas finally becoming an official single :

Big Boi ft. Gucci Mane - Shine Blockas

If this doesn't blow up to the point where Big Boi's long awaited solo album can get an early 2010 release date, then I'm gonna...I'm gonna.... whine about it on here and in various rap blog comment sections. Ya dun want.